Ideas - Experts Say American Democracy is at a Precipice, and Time is Ticking

Episode Date: November 4, 2024

Ahead of the U.S. presidential election, there are growing fears that American democracy is headed toward a crisis point. In this 2022 episode, IDEAS contributor Melissa Gismondi unpacks the idea that America as we've known it may be ending, while exploring where the country may be headed, and what — if anything — can save it.

Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goltar and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and most of all true crime podcasts. But sometimes I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast Crime Story comes in. Every week I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. The select committee to investigate the January 6th attack on the United

States Capitol will be in order. The United States is at a turning point. I want them to know that 1776 is always an option. Some are calling for revolution. It's 1776! 1776! Others fear what the country has become. The American democratic system, I'm sorry to say this, but the American democratic system is sick. There's a poison, there's a toxicity that exists right now. We will abolish abortion! America is deeply polarized.

Abortion, safe and legal! Intentions are running high. These degenerates in the deep state are going to give us what we want, or we are going to shut this country down. Until recently, the thought of America collapsing might have sounded crazy. But now... What I do not just worry about,

but actually in some ways anticipate, is a routinization of political violence. It's not like a bomb going off. It's a very slow slide. Democracy is always a process of becoming. The next four years will determine whether 50 years from now, people will look back on this as a bad moment in American history, or look back on it as the moment when America's democracy perished. This documentary, originally aired in 2022, is part of our series New World Disorder.

In this episode, contributor Melissa Gismondi puts her PhD in American history to work as she digs into the crisis facing the United States. They were what I call cautionary tales. Science fiction writer Octavia Butler. If we keep misbehaving ourselves, ignoring what we've been ignoring, doing what we've been doing to the environment, for instance, here's what we're liable to wind up with. This is Butler, just a few months before her death in 2006 on the program Democracy Now!, talking about her novels Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents.

The novels are published in the 1990s, but they take place in the 2020s and 2030s. They portray a United States that has descended into economic and climate chaos. At one point, the country's ruled by Andrew Steele Jarrett, an authoritarian leader who's supported by religious fundamentalists. He vows to, quote, make America great again. She says, choose your leaders with wisdom and passage describing her character's thoughts on Jared's election. is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool. To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen. To be led by a liar is to ask to be lied to.

To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery. Butler's vision is just one of several dystopian takes on America that now seem prophetic. Although much in the U.S. is as it's always been, things are palpably different now. What is in severe danger of actual collapse or end is the constitutional order over the entirety of the United States that to this point has made the United States a singular political entity since the 1780s. That is under severe, I would say, almost unprecedented risk of collapse. So when we say the end of America, more accurately, we should say the potential end of the constitutional order of America, or the potential end of the United States as a political society as conceived in the late 1780s.

Jason Opel is a professor of history at McGill University. I studied the founding period of America with him as an undergraduate and MA student. He helped me later as I continued towards my PhD. So Jason, I first took one of your American history classes something like 13 years ago now. Did you ever think we'd be sitting here discussing the idea of the end of America? No. I have been quite surprised by the speed and the openness of anti-democratic movements in the United States over the last five years or so, it has come as quite a shock to see how quickly very old and apparently stable institutions and assumptions about political practice have come under severe, direct, and oftentimes successful attack. Has there, sort of looking back over the last sort of five, 10 years,

has there been a moment or event that kind of crystallizes this for you? Yes. I think in the two to three weeks after the events of January 6th, 2021, when a very large crowd of Trump supporters first besieged and then invaded the United States Capitol with the explicit purpose of stopping a relatively routine, but important constitutional process of certifying the results of the 2020 election. That was shocking and violent. Seven people were killed. Over 100 were wounded. But that itself was not the moment that crystallized the extraordinary threat for me. The moment actually was two, three weeks after those events.

The moment actually was two, three weeks after those events, when, with extremely few exceptions, most Republicans at the national level announced or made clear their support for the person responsible for that attack. When the Republican leader in House of Representatives from the state of California showed himself, went to Mar-a-Lago, where the then ex-president was hiding out or staying, and the Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy, took a picture with the former president smiling arm in arm. That's the moment. Basically, you have an increasingly robust and powerful, but I would say the most powerful thing about them is their daringness, right-wing anti-democratic movement, which has found a home in and indeed taken the leadership role in one of the country's two main political parties. And then on the other hand, you have a opposing party that is led by a geriatric leadership that seems largely unable to meet the moment considering the anti-democratic and indeed fascist at points threats of the Republican Party.

My name is Deva Woodley, Associate Professor of Politics at the New School. Really, since the drafting of the Constitution, there has been a compromise between elements, so a compromise between elements of democracy and guards against majority tyranny, as it was sort of framed by Madison and some of the other sort of founders. So there's been that compromise, but that compromise is also mapped onto and invigorated by a sort of avoidance of diverse rule, right? So multiracial democracy. And each time the United States has kind of tried to, or had the challenge of making the choice between having a democracy that enfranchises more people, especially more people of color, women, et., each time the United States has made a kind of devil's bargain. And that bargain is often trying to be as accommodating as possible to anti-democratic, racist forces, more or less. And this happens after the Civil War and Reconstruction. It happens during the

New Deal period, and it is happening now. With that battle over voting rights in Georgia, Republican lawmakers have passed a law on a party line vote overhauling the election rules in that state. They say the law will help protect against voter fraud, but Democrats and critics say the law disenfranchises primarily people of color. Now it's a particularly critical time because the forces are not only racist, but also avowedly anti-democratic. This is not a new question that the United States has faced, right? Will we be a multiracial democracy? Will we be a democracy in which everyone is enfranchised in every region of the country?

That's an old question for this country, but it's being answered in a particularly precarious way. Well, let me be very clear to the folks who are watching tonight. If you think that this is something happening down in Georgia, you are misapprehending the moment that we're living in. If you think that this is something happening to black voters, you still don't quite clearly understand. This is a defining moment for the American democracy. I think centrally the idea of America collapsing has been one of the most appealing narratives culturally in this country for a while now. And a lot of that makes sense because when you're at the top of the mountain, when you're the dominant empire, the thought naturally runs to how that empire might come to an end. And I think a lot of the storylines about that

tend to run in the direction of sort of outright failure, civil war, but in reality, the fractures are much more akin to sort of hairline cracks that get a little bit wider every year. My name is Omar Al-Akkad. I'm an author and a journalist, and for the last eight or nine years, I've been living just south of Portland, Oregon. We are in a situation where, for at least the last 20 years, what used to be the fringe of the Republican Party, for example, has slowly crept into its mainstream. And so what you're watching in terms of quote-unquote collapse looks a lot more like things that used to be unthinkable or fringe a few years ago becoming more and more acceptable and the entire orientation of the

society changing accordingly. And that's a scary thing because it's not like a bomb going off. It's not like something that you can witness instantaneously and react to. It's a very slow slide that's much harder to look at as something that needs to be stopped immediately. That's what scares me the most about the direction in which this country is headed. Well, I think for many years, let's say maybe 30 years, we've seen the basic premise of representative democracy unravel in America. That premise is that all of us are represented equally, and that premise is unraveled because of the effects of money in politics, the suppression of the vote, the emergence of the new and virulent filibuster or whatever. We could go through the list of what has made that true, but what it's produced is a radically unrepresentative representative democracy. And yet at the same time, our capacity as a people for addressing that in a sensible and balanced and informed way has also collapsed.

My name is Lawrence Lessig. I'm a professor of law at Harvard Law School. Lawrence Lessig has been fighting for democratic reform for the last 15 years. He even ran briefly in the 2016 presidential election on a message of campaign finance reform and fixing America's electoral system. There's a great passage in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises where one person is asked, how did you go bankrupt? And the answer is slowly at first and then all at once. And I think that's a description of where we are with this democracy. People have been fighting for a more representative democracy forever. But I think that between 1971 and 2010, we were pretty good on most of the

dimensions of democracy. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 plus the 26th Amendment, which guaranteed everybody 18 and older could vote, basically meant everybody was represented. And the government was pretty good at avoiding techniques to suppress the vote. And gerrymandering was not yet crazy and weaponized. And nobody was talking about flipping presidential results. The most anybody could be worrying about was rich people had too much power inside the political system. That concern feels quaint today. Would that this were the only problem? Because it would seem almost manageable. But the fact that we're dealing with all of these

dimensions of inequality at once, political equality, we could talk forever about economic equality or racial equality. Those are important as well. But the core promise of a republic, a representative democracy, is political equality. The fact that we're facing all of these dimensions of inequality at once, and with a media that doesn't help us address it in any sensible or comprehensive way, I think is a catastrophic threat for the American democracy. And then to see, added on to that, people openly embracing the idea of subverting a democratic result is as bad as it gets. And I think the next four years will determine whether 50 years from

now people will look back on this as a bad moment in American history, the way you might look at the Civil War as a bad moment in American history, or look back on it as the moment when America's democracy perished. With a country as powerful as the United States, it's easy to forget there was a time when it didn't exist, when the 13 colonies that signed the Declaration of Independence were just one part of Britain's expansive empire. But even then, there were strands in the political fabric that continue up to the present. Prior to the creation of the United States

as a political entity under constitutional rule in the 1780s, prior to the American Revolution, there were powerful strands of Protestant extremism by European standards, by British standards, that took root in North America much more so than they did in England and most other European societies. Two of these include the Puritan groups that were dominant in New England, but their ideas spread. And in addition, Scottish settlers from Northern Ireland, so-called Ulstermen, who brought an extremely vivid form of Presbyterian worship to North America. North America. Both of these two groups, the Puritans and the Ulstermen, routinely referred to themselves as the new Israel, by which they meant God's chosen people in the wilderness, reliving the epics of the Old Testament, whose goal and destiny was to create a godly society that would precipitate the return of Christ. That's not all American, it wasn't all

colonials, but it was two powerful roots of religious nationalism in North America. Then the revolution happens and the Constitution is a remarkably secular document. The U.S. Constitution itself does not mention God, but those ideas still germinated. And then in the early 19th century, they became the dominant way to describe American nationalism because the American nation was born in violent settlers in what is now the northeastern United States, especially Massachusetts, they were in the midst of extreme violence with a number of different indigenous nations. And they described that violence not in the terms of European warfare. They described it rather as the war of the ancient Israelites against their enemies, against the enemies of God, against demons, heathens, devils.

Okay, so what, well, you know, that became the first bestsellers in the United States, in America, that are published in America, as opposed to in England, are a recounting of that epic violence. as opposed to in England, are a recounting of that epic violence. They are a recounting of the story of God's people in extreme duress, their bodies being violated, the temple of their bodies and the temple of their homes being scalped and bled and penetrated and mutilated and burned. Again, so what? Well, so everything. That's the general, most dominant, most emotionally significant story about who we are, that Americans, white Americans, learned for generations, heard, felt, thought, recounted. And what makes this different from other Western states and Western nations is that that form of nationalism was specifically tied to the idea that the nation, the American nation as formed, was the singular tool or channel of God to smite his enemies, to destroy his foes, and to ultimately occasion the return of Christ.

That's a big deal. That's really quite distinct in the United States, right? So it's not like saying, well, it's a Christian nation because most of the founders and the people who were there when the country was founded were Christian. If that were the case, then virtually all Western states as well as Canada would be also having the same kind of religious nationalism. That's not what this is saying. This is a form of religious nationalism that says the United States and the United States alone is God's vessel or God's regent on earth to bring back God's son. That is an emotionally powerful storyline, and now it is threatening to destroy the United States' constitutional order. Omar al-Akkad is a former reporter with the Globe and Mail and has written about the divide in America.

and has written about the divide in America. His 2017 novel, American War, imagines what a second civil war set in the near future might look like. You know, one of the things about American War is that it takes place in this future at a point where fossil fuel use has become irrelevant. People have moved on almost everywhere in the world, and yet in this particular part of the South, they won't. Not because it's beneficial anymore, but just out of stubbornness. We've always done it this way, you don't tell me what to do.

And I think that impulse is going to be at the heart of whatever widens this fracture further. fracture further. And weirdly enough, I picked fossil fuels thinking that there was no way that that would literally be the thing, you know. And then I'm watching this country now and thinking, no, fossil fuels is probably going to be the thing. It's very weird to watch that. But at its heart, it could be anything. It could be any topic. But it's about stubbornness. It's about this idea of the country I want and me wanting it is more important than anyone else's reality. I don't know what specific event is going to see that manifest in the ugliest possible way, but it's certainly going to have something to do with that inherent stubbornness. to have something to do with that inherent stubbornness. Throughout the book, for people who haven't read it, there are excerpts from archives, transcripts, and histories that are sort of chronicling the second Civil War, the one you imagine in the book. And one excerpt is from a peace officer during reunification talks.

And he says, and here's the quote, I told the president's people, if we go along with this, if we nod and smile while they parade some fantasy about this being a noble disagreement between equals, not a bloody fight over their stubborn commitment to a ruinous fuel, the war will never really be over. And then later he goes on to say, you fight the war with guns, you fight the peace with stories. For me, there are clear echoes here of what happened after the real historical American Civil War, the rush to reunify, the haphazard policies surrounding Reconstruction, and then the rise of Jim Crow not long after. So I'm curious what sort of stands out for you when you think about this excerpt now, you know, all these years later after you wrote it,

and particularly that phrase, you fight the war with guns, you fight the peace with stories. So that line from American War, you fight the war with guns, you fight the peace with stories, was inspired by a billboard I saw on the side of the road just north of the border between Georgia and Florida. A long time ago, I was in Miami. I was doing a story on climate change, and I had a few extra days. And so I decided to go up and do this story outside of Atlanta. It's this town that has a law in the books that requires every household to own a gun. And I thought it was interesting, and I wanted to go write about it. So I'm driving up, and just after I cross the border into Georgia,

I see this billboard on the side of the road. And it's just one word in big letters. All it says is, secede. It doesn't even say, you know, brought to you by, or like visit our website, or nothing like that. It just says says secede. And it was fascinating to me because usually when nations fight wars and one side wins, one of the first things they do is impose restrictions on the kind of ideology that caused the war to break out in the first place.

These are people who tried to destroy the country to preserve slavery, and they are fully allowed to maintain the same ideology that almost caused this country to fall apart. And I think of that in the context of present-day United States, where one of the two major political parties in this country is actively on the side of insurrectionists. It is actively defending human beings who rushed the Capitol building looking to violently take down the federal government of this country because they believed in a lie. Whatever happens in terms of physical violence whatever happens in terms of physical violence is always going to be underpinned by ideology. And one of the most terrifying things about the United States, not just today, but for much of its history, is the notion that the ruinous ideology is allowed to survive because it's considered somehow sacred. You'll sometimes hear people say what's happening

in America is unprecedented, but there are parallels between the crisis today and the period leading up to the Civil War. One way in which it's parallel is that the press had been divided. So, you know, one of the striking realities of antebellum America was that northern newspapers that would talk about slavery and even northern letters that would address the question of slavery were not allowed to be circulated in the South. They were explicitly banned. The post office for periods of time would not distribute them. Newspapers would be burned if they attempted to be distributed talking about this. So people in the North had one view of reality and people of the South had a different view of reality. And as those views never met, these two segments of America could march themselves

into a war that neither expected would be the catastrophic conflict that it was. But it's also more complicated today because it's not just a red state, blue state divide or a north-south divide. It's actually a rural-urban divide, which makes the sort of picture a little bit more mixed. But regardless, you have a kind of separation in terms of people's beliefs, right? Fundamental vision for what America is and should look like, what the sort of fundamental values that the nation is built on should be and what they shouldn't be. And it's unlikely that there will be a kind of resolution of those diametrically opposed views in terms of compromise, right? That's not necessarily a bad thing, right? Like it's difficult to compromise with folks who,

for example, don't think that you should exist in terms of like LGBTQ issues, in terms of racial justice issues, in terms of women's rights issues, economic justice issues, right? There comes a point where you feel like you are living in completely different realities. Take a state like Wisconsin, which is a deeply divided state where people are as red and people are as blue as you could possibly be. How does the Civil War play out in Wisconsin? And of course, Wisconsin sits right next to Illinois, which is a deeply blue state. And so there's no simple geographic way to imagine take seriously people who are mapping out the way in which this very easily could spin into a military conflict. If there's an actual conflict, it's less like the Civil War and more like Putin's war in Ukraine because there's no imagining one side just giving up.

There's no way of imagining the decision to end the conflict. Americans now are so fatigued by this, they might think it has always been like this, but it's really quite new to have routinely political figures say, we are at war with our opponents. I am quoting directly from the winner of a GOP Republican primary in the state of Tennessee, specifically said, we are in a war, a moral war, a political war, and a spiritual war against liberals, against blue states. To be clear, you are saying that other Americans are your mortal enemies. That's what a war is. The metaphor quickly collapses. War means you kill people.

War means you solve problems violently, not politically. That is deeply frightening. And it has a clear echo in the 1850s. You normally saw this in the South, but sometimes in the North as well, certainly with some Northerners, saying this is basically war. And our opponents are not fellow Americans or fellow citizens with whom we have disagreements. They are enemies. Enemies you don't talk with.

Enemies you don't compromise with. Enemies you kill. Judging by volume, judging by clarity, the clear, consistent message in much of American political discourse now, mostly from the right, but not always, is that fellow Americans are enemies and that the world of political discussion is over and a new era of war has begun. We are at war! You're listening to Ideas on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America on Sirius XM,

in Australia on ABC Radio National and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. You can also find us on the CBC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayed. Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA

and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you got to know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighborhood or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto wherever you get your podcasts. Check out This Is Toronto wherever you get your podcasts. I think we need to quit mincing words and just talk about truths.

And what it was going to be was an armed revolution. America is in crisis. Nearly three in ten Americans overall agree it may be necessary at some point soon for citizens to take up arms against the government. It is so much worse than we thought it was. The attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, might be the most glaring example of what's at stake. But America's divisions run deep. History is watching us and our children are counting on us.

In this episode of our five-part series, The New World Disorder, Ideas contributor Melissa Gismondi explores the crisis facing the United States right now. Nearly 200 years ago, when the Constitutional Convention had completed its work, a dear lady sidled up to Benjamin Franklin and asked him the question, A dear lady sidled up to Benjamin Franklin and asked him the question, well, Dr. Franklin, what have you given us? Dr. Franklin turned to her and said, you have a republic, madam, if you can keep it. And so it was after thousands of years... Jerry Falwell was a major televangelist and founder of the Moral Majority, which united white evangelicals and the American right.

Falwell's speaking here at UCLA in 1983, and what he's saying has since become a prevalent notion among conservative voters. The idea that the United States was at its heart a Christian nation, and that liberal values threatened the very existence of it. And thus we ushered in a period of materialism that produced the rebellion of the 60s and 70s, the dark ages of the 20th century, and caused during those 20 years a breakdown of most of the values that had been precious to and essential to the health of this republic for two centuries. We ushered in moral permissiveness. We ushered in a 40% divorce rate, the live-in arrangement, the homosexual lifestyle.

Historian Jason Opel says this sentiment is part of an American religious nationalism that's become more militant in recent years. Of all of the leaders of the evangelical Protestants, the white evangelical Protestants who make up Donald Trump's base, the single most influential of those people who is most associated with Donald Trump, I would say is a man named Robert Jeffress, who is the minister and leader of a so-called megachurch in Dallas, Texas. If you don't hear another word I say this morning, hear this. What we're facing in this country is

not a battle between Republicans and Democrats. It is a battle between good and evil, between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of Satan, that's exactly what is at stake in this country. He is not as famous as like a Jerry Falwell type, but Mr. Jeffress was a close advisor to and major ally of Mr. Trump. Mr. Jeffress is an enormously powerful man. In addition to the over 10,000 people who attend his services in Dallas, he has tens or hundreds of thousands, if not millions of listeners on a podcast. He has weekly radio shows. He also has a series called Path to Victory, in which he describes explicitly the spiritual and moral war between godly Americans and secular Americans. He has made a major point that roughly every single abortion that has been performed in the United

States since Roe v. Wade constitutes the greatest moral disaster in American history, and that it constitutes a genocide of unborn Americans. He referred to President Biden, who himself is a practicing Catholic, only the second Catholic president, as an abomination. Such is the language of religious nationalism, and such is the language of this extremely powerful person who is very clear that what he wants is Donald Trump to run for president again, that Donald Trump can count on every person that he considers to be a godly American that he ministered to, in a very, to me, a very concrete example of modern evangelical militarism and religious nationalism with a specifically political goal to rule the United States, regardless of vote counts, regardless of electoral outcomes. In fairness, Mr. Jeffress did say several months after the 2020 election that Biden was the president-elect. He asked people to pray for President Biden. But he's made equally clear, he says in the same statements, we, as in my followers,

obey a sovereign God who is sovereign over every inch of this universe. That is not the language of someone who is accepting a political reality and going to live in a pluralistic democratic situation. It's someone saying, we lost this time, we'll be back, and we will take over. When I think of an ending in terms of the United States as a nation, it's very difficult for me to think of a finish line. I'm 40 years old, which means that I grew up in between two different versions of the apocalypse. The generation that came just before me had the nuclear apocalypse as their dominant image of failure, which was instantaneous, and it was subject to human agency. The generation to which I technically belong,

but most of whom are much younger than me, has a much more gradual image of the apocalypse, related to climate change. This notion that there is no finish line, things just get continuously worse until the existence of the species is at risk. And I think when I try to wrap my head around the United States and its end conditions, I gravitate much more towards that gradual decline rather than something instantaneous. Just to ensure it's not a student emergency. Yes, I am a teacher at Columbine High School. There is a student here with a gun. the first time in my lifetime that there was a major school shooting in the united states it was such a huge touchstone moment that they made documentaries about it school violence erupted again today suddenly and with a vengeance columbine high in littleton

colorado it has been a horror in 1999 two high school students went on a deadly rampage it's still talked about as a sort of single a single word a single phrase i doubt very much that anyone's going to try to film documentaries about all the school shootings that have happened in the last year alone because they would run out of resources to do so. There have been so many. It's been absorbed into the national psyche that this is just something you live with. And so when I think about the United States and its decline, I think of that tolerance again, what you learn to live with. I think it's just going to be the kind of country that unless major structural change is undertaken at huge political cost, this is a population that's just going to have to learn

with things getting gradually worse on almost every front, unless you're a billionaire. And then the turnaround moment, if it ever comes, will be when that level of inconvenience finally touches the billionaires. I don't think this ends with another Gettysburg or that sort of moment of mass bloodshed, maybe that'll be included in the decline. But I don't think of that as the sort of central trajectory here. I think of a gradual increasing tolerance for things getting worse. Democracy is active. Democracy demands that citizens are citizens, right? We're not just people under democracy. We're certainly not subjects under democracy. We are supposed to be citizens. And citizens are folks who are responsible to participate in the governance of themselves. And so when people feel a kind of

democratic despair, when they practice a politics of despair, which is a practice of disengagement, which is a practice of disillusionment and nihilism, even when warranted, when disappointment is warranted. It's not that this despair as an emotion is not warranted. It's that if despair becomes a politics, then democracy cannot persist because democracy requires a population that is committed to governing itself. Otherwise, it disappears and devolves into oligarchy and autocracy. And so what's really important is that there is an antidote, a political antidote to the politics of despair. And that has to be the involvement of people in the political process. I think about it primarily through the lens of social movements as an antidote to political

despair. But participation of every kind is an antidote to political despair. 75 million Americans have voted already. That's more than half of the entire vote four years ago. For the first time since the overturning of Roe v. Wade, abortion on the ballot. Kansans voting to keep constitutional abortion protections that allow most abortions up to 22 weeks. A rare instance where citizens, not just legislators, have a say in their state's abortion laws. not just legislators, have a say in their state's abortion laws. I truly think that the trajectory for this century, you know, will be decided in the next decade. It's contingent. I think that's hard for people to sort of accept and understand. But if you kind of look back at the history of the 20th century, which I think is parallel in many

ways, parallel at least in terms of the unsettledness of it, the pace of change, the notion that so many things were possible for better and for worse, right? The technological change, right? All of that was also happening at the beginning of the 20th century. And it really took until the 1940s for everything to kind of shake out. And the sort of consensus that was formed through political action, not through sort of anything inevitable, not in the 1940s, but then over the next 25 years, only held for about 30 years. But it felt like forever. Because that's the story that we told ourselves. So in the 19th century, with the American Civil War, the stakes were life and death for soldiers and civilians and for the nation itself.

What do you think the stakes are now? Is it similar? I don't think the stakes are, you know, they're not as clear in terms of, you know, the map dividing up into actually hostile countries that will begin to shoot at each other. No, not that. But what I do not just worry about, but actually in some ways anticipate, I'm sorry to say, is a routinization of political violence, which I mean violence specifically for political ends, things like kidnapping of candidates, things like the assassination of candidates or of political enemies. I'm not saying it's inevitable. There are ways out of this, but I think that that's a real imminent possibility. And what would that mean? I mean, it would mean, again, the United States would continue to exist and you would still have elections and you would still have many democratic, small-D democratic practices. You would have candidates who were killed and lost the election because they died.

You would have more clashes in the streets. You would have more forms of violence replacing political and democratic discourse. Perhaps something similar to what you saw what occurred in Ireland for much of large parts of the 20th century. You know, political violence is a part of life. Many countries in the Western Hemisphere, Colombia has democratic dimensions to it. It also had a long period of political violence. I can even imagine blue states,

Northeastern states and the West Pacific states having enough of this and trying to give up or giving up on a constitutional order for the entire lower 48 and saying, we're done with this, and we're just not going to tolerate this, and that leading to some pretty dark places. I can foresee that. I really can. I think the most volatile scenario is one that involves a plain disregard of the election results. Now, of course, nobody will ever say we're disregarding the election results. What they will say is,

we don't believe the election was a fair election, or we believe fraud marred the election. And so because we don't believe the process was fair, we, the legislature, or we, the Secretary of State, will reverse the selected—for example, since 1846, Congress has said they will be selected on Election Day, the second Tuesday in November—it's certainly easy to imagine that the electors that are so selected could be directed by the state legislature to vote one way or another. Supreme Court just decided that case. I argued that case in the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court disagreed with me and said that state legislatures have the power to tell electors how they must vote. Well, okay, so imagine in 2024, Pennsylvania passes a law that says the electors must vote as the legislature so certifies. And imagine that they select electors on election day who support the Democratic candidate, but Pennsylvania is a wildly gerrymandered state, so the Republicans control the state legislature.

Imagine the state legislature votes and says, those electors must vote for the Republican candidate because we don't believe the election was fairly conducted or we don't believe the results reflect the will of the people. Well, under existing law, those electors have got to vote as they are directed by the legislature to vote. And so it's a pretty trivially simple way for the results to be overturned in a way that the Supreme Court has now basically said is constitutionally permissible. And so I fear that if that happens, January 6th will look like a carnival because

as much as people on the left have scorned what people on the right did on January 6th, I think what they miss in that is that most of those people on the Hill on January 6th honestly and genuinely that their election has been stolen. And they honestly and genuinely believe that people have acted to subvert the democratic will. I'm not sure what you should do in that circumstance. You know, I think, you know, defending your republic against such a theft is the first obligation of being a citizen. And so I think that if these techniques get deployed in 2024 to subvert the democratic results, it's easy to see how that spins into violence in a way that we have no clear mechanism for tamping down. There's no shortage of dystopian takes on America.

We could sit here and list them, and you wrote one yourself. I see it as a dystopian take, certainly. What would a utopian American novel look like right now? You know, it's weird thinking about what a utopian take on America would look like for a variety of reasons, one of which being that I'm working on this story right now where I try to do just that. And anyone who reads the first few pages of this thing is going to think it's the most dystopian novel ever written. Because for me, what is utopian about societies happens almost exclusively at an individual level. It's what people within a community do to and for one another. And so, for example, I have this

community that is obsessed with the idea that childhood should be sacrosanct. And so no matter how bad things are going, no matter how unaffordable food is, or no matter how bad the climate gets, everyone in the society is doing everything they can at all times to make sure that all the kids are having the happiest childhood imaginable. And to me, that's an incredibly utopian way of thinking about how to order a society. Others may disagree or may think it's naive or whatever, but also these people live in a dust bowl where there was once a lake that has dried up. And so at a macro level, it's an incredibly dystopian vision of the world. And yet I think of it as a deeply utopian society

because of what these people are doing to and for each other. That I think is how I generally come to the idea of the utopian within the context of not just the United States, but any place. There are community groups where I live who are doing really, really important work to get people into homes. And to make it so that if you're having a mental health crisis, the first person who shows up isn't carrying a gun. And they're doing all of this at an individual level. And so when I think of the utopian, I start at that place. When I think of the utopian, I start at that place. And I have a particular disdain for anybody whose involvement with politics starts and ends with voting for a president every four years.

Because I always want to say, no, go find out who's running for the city council and the school board. You know, start at that place. Start closest to the individual. Because that's where the utopian is most attainable. If you're voting for the president every four years, that train has already left the station. It is always unclear what is possible until it is accomplished. So what will people fight for? I don't think that there's any kind of inevitable answer to that. People will fight for what they think is possible and necessary and desirable.

is possible and necessary and desirable. And part of making people sort of think about what is possible is also making them think about what it is they want and saying that if we band together, we can get this thing you want. And so the question is, will people be organized to achieve and organize themselves to achieve a multiracial, more equitable democracy in the 21st century? Or will people be organized to achieve an autocratic, fascistic, uber-capitalist dystopia?

Either of these things could happen. Stop the steal! Stop the steal! Stop the steal! Democracy and politics, generally speaking, but certainly democratic politics, is always a process of becoming, you know? Angela Davis says freedom is a constant struggle. I mean, it kind of is. But that doesn't mean that we can't do better, that we don't do better, that we won't do better.

But it also doesn't mean that we can't do worse. This documentary was produced by contributor Melissa Gismondi and was originally broadcast in 2022. For more on our five-part series, The New World Disorder, head to our website, cbc.ca slash ideas. Special thanks to Leonard Moore, Lisa Ananias, and Kate Zeman. Lisa Ayuso is our web producer. Technical production, Danielle Duval. Nikola Lukšić is our web producer. Technical production, Danielle Duval. Nikola Lukšić is our senior producer.

The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly. And I'm Nala Ayed. If you'll permit me, I'd like to say also that I think Canada and other countries that want to be and are in important ways democratic, really should think about fireproofing their constitutional orders. They should really think about how you can teach people to value democracy and how that's hard and how it's difficult to disagree and difficult to compromise. to disagree and difficult to compromise. But that, believe us, it is the better and the more ethical and the more just alternative. So I hope that Canada and other Western countries, all countries, you know, see what's happening in the United States and understand you have to update your democratic institutions. You have to work at democratic life. You have to think of it as a way of life

that is hard to preserve and hard to improve. But that must be done. Because when it gets as bad as it has in the United States, it is really hard to come back from. The best way to avoid this problem is not to get there.